True Embodiment

The topic of embodiment is an interesting one. It seems everyone is an embodiment teacher these days. And yet, are we deeply experiencing life with our entire being? Is there a way in which we are still divided in our everyday experience? Could we penetrate deeper into our experience, truly touch the source of life, integrate, let go, and walk around from a place of unity? 

Flips, handstands, and cartwheels are great, but that’s not quite the embodiment practice I am talking about when referring to embodiment here. I’m talking about meeting our experience, meeting life, merging with what we are doing with our total being, and that changing how we interact with everything we encounter.  This could be someone in a wheelchair as well as a ballerina. As the Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno showed at the end of his life, he could dance by just moving his hand while in a wheelchair.  His whole relating with life was a sublime expression.

Having a container to explore and allow this mysterious process to take hold has real value. Taking the time to explore what is actually happening. Breaking the rules, questioning what is real, seeing for ourselves what happens when we take a step, when we drop all of our armor. 

As we go deeper, notions of Inside and outside will change. Maybe our internal world implodes and our body becomes the environment? Maybe we have no internal world anymore. There is only everything creating us, forming our bodies. Our sense of inside and outside, self and other may have no real intrinsic meaning to us anymore. Maybe as we begin to deepen in this process, how we breathe will completely change, not from a technique, but from getting into our process and allowing it to blossom and manifest through us. 

And in that unification, we’ll begin to encounter everything from this new fresh, physical place, and all of our relationships will begin to transform.  Meeting each room, we become it. Meeting each person, we become them.  And in that unified relating, truth will naturally begin to drive through us like a divining rod.

As our perception deepens, we will begin to interact with the layers of life in a richer way. As we become more sensitive to what is happening all of the time, we encounter a fuller spectrum of experience. This fuller spectrum of feeling is sometimes called energy. But it could also be described as just deeper levels of experiencing what is actually happening, more precise and more delicate ways of encountering life.  It will be a feast we’ll be able to eat from for the rest of our lives. This melding into the unknown is the most creative process I have ever encountered, and to see people immersed in this extremely personal process is so fascinating and beautiful and unique.

Once we get a sense of this, we won’t need to go ask anyone, what is meditation? What am I supposed to do with my spirituality?  We’ll be deeply involved in a vital dynamic physical transformation process, an undeniable and inevitable nailing to reality, and we’ll be molded by it towards manifesting divine principles.

A bit about me:

I spent my twenties in Japan and the states in a cellular transformation process.  I went from being a somewhat gifted but very sensitive young exposed nerve walking around battling life, literally a walking ki problem, to someone who had touched the main line, the source of life and been recast by it.  I had the great karma to encounter some deeply enlightened teachers, and they helped usher me into my process and gave me the space to creatively dive into this ocean of feeling, to touch this invincible place. Then, like a newborn baby, I had the safe container in the monastery to explore bringing that truth through me in everyday experience, a process I continue to explore to this day.

So when taking a step, how can the whole universe come with me?  When reaching for a rice ball, heaven and earth part and merge.  Hearing the pots singing in the kitchen, catching the traces of birds on the wing. 

Now I’m a husband and a papa, and my family teaches me every day to love more deeply. My work is sharing some of the gifts I was lucky enough to encounter, and helping bring people through their own very personal metamorphosis, as I have some unique insights about this process not spoken of much in the world of spirituality or embodiment.  I had some experiences which erupted through me and gave me the feeling to shout from the mountaintops that people can realize something very deep in this life, and that is the driving force which compels me to keep going, gently sharing and watching people go through their own personal process. It’s all so beautiful and delicate and awe inspiring.

Although I do not think of this as a Zen group, many longtime Zen students come to this work to deepen their process and touch the essence we explore together.  But I love to work with all types of people, and value diversity of experience and interest. In reality, all of these forms are not real, but mediums to explore our inherent true nature.

We are about to head into our next quarterly month-long online Immersion in July. The theme is: What is embodiment?. This can be thought of as a container, a blank canvas to get to the bottom line of our experience and see what is real. I suggest people take the time to explore, carte blanche, what is actually happening in their experience, and dig into that process and allow it to dissolve you.

Thank you! Hugs to you all!

You can do it!  Please share this with anyone who would be interested in joining us or who might benefit from its message.